Our Lady of Guadalupe: the apparitions to Juan Diego and the tilma image at Tepeyac

Tepeyac is a hill on the northern edge of what is now Mexico City. Before the Spanish arrived, people worshipped Aztec earth and mother goddesses there, especially Tonantzin. Tenochtitlán had fallen about ten years before. The Franciscan Juan de Zumárraga was bishop. The story is told in a Nahuatl narrative, the Nican Mopohua, printed in 1649.

Saturday, 9 December 1531, by the Julian calendar. Very early in the morning. Juan Diego, a Nahua convert from Cuauhtitlán, heard singing from the small hill, "like the song of many fine birds." When the voices ceased, it was as if the hill answered.

At the summit a Maiden was standing. "Her dress shone like the sun, as if it were gleaming." The rock beneath her seemed to send forth beams of light. The ground sparkled "as the rays of a rainbow in the mist." She asked for a church on the hill.

Zumárraga did not believe him. The bishop asked for a sign and had Juan Diego followed. Near the wooden bridge to Tepeyac, his followers lost sight of him. Then his uncle, Juan Bernardino, fell seriously ill.

Tuesday, 12 December. She came to meet him on the side of the hill. "Am I not here, I who am your mother?" She sent him to the summit, where only weeds and thorns grew. He found Castilian roses, "very fragrant, and full of the night dew." She returned them to the fold of his tilma.

At the bishop's house, Juan Diego unfolded his white tilma. The flowers fell to the floor. And "suddenly there appeared upon it the beloved Image." Those present fell to their knees. The bishop was in tears. That day Juan Bernardino was found healed. He had seen her in exactly the same form, and she gave her name: "Holy Mary of Guadalupe."

Doubt came early. In 1556 the Franciscan provincial Francisco de Bustamante preached that the image was "painted by an Indian." Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar heard nine witnesses. None mentioned Juan Diego or any apparition, and none of Zumárraga's surviving writings mention it. In 1666 six painters judged it "impossible that any human artist could have painted" the image on such coarse fabric.

In 1979 Philip Serna Callahan's infrared photography found no underdrawing, but also additions and repaintings. In 1982 José Sol Rosales, commissioned by Abbot Guillermo Schulenburg, found pigments available in 16th-century Mexico and multiple touch-ups. José Aste Tönsmann claimed 13 figures in the eyes.

Scholars broadly agree it is a 16th-century painting by Indigenous artists, perhaps Marcos Cipac de Aquino. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid suggested Montúfar commissioned it around 1555 to replace the cult of Tonantzin. Stafford Poole read the apparition story as a later legend. Schulenburg called Juan Diego "a symbol, not a reality." Dunning called the eye figures "random blobs of pigment." Poole judged the Codex Escalada, dated 1548, "most probably a crude nineteenth century forgery."

Rome approved the apparitions in 1754, and Juan Diego was canonized on 31 July 2002. The image flew on Miguel Hidalgo's banner in 1810. On 14 November 1921, a bomb hidden in flowers damaged the altar below it. The image was unharmed. In December 2009, a record 6.1 million pilgrims came to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where the cloak still hangs.